How did Andy Beshear get here? 4 reasons why the governor’s name has gone national

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The national political landscape has shifted again, and again, and again in the last week since Democratic President Joe Biden’s poor debate performance.

It’s possible those shifts could situate Gov. Andy Beshear in a higher political office, with some chatter of him teaming up with Vice President Kamala Harris if she were to replace Biden on the top of the Democratic ticket.

Biden stepping aside seemed highly unlikely for a long time, but the chorus of people calling for Biden to step aside has grown louder this week. And it’s not just the media bubble – national polls from the New York Times showed 74% of voters think Biden is too old for the job of president, and another from the Wall Street Journal had that rate at 80%.

Amid the bad political news for the sitting president, Beshear will be among a group of more than 20 Democratic governors planning to meet with the president Wednesday evening. They’ve got concerns about how the president is doing, according to Beshear’s recent interview with CNN’s Pamela Brown about the matter.

Brown also noted that “allies of Vice President Harris are floating your name as a potential running mate option for her.”

Beshear himself did not recoil from the suggestion that he could be Harris’ running mate.

So, how did he get here?

Political wins

John Morgan of Morgan & Morgan leads the biggest personal injury law firm in the world. His company’s whole selling point is helping clients win their cases.

In Beshear, for whom he and his firm have raised heaps of campaign funds, Morgan sees a winner.

“When the governors meet the President today… I pray the campaign listens carefully to Andy Beshear. He is the only democrat to win TWICE, in a very RED state,” Morgan posted to social media site X.

Beyond the donor class, Beshear’s electoral record in Red America may attract party higher-ups and others in Washington.

He won by razor-thin margins in 2015 to claim his place as the state’s attorney general, and then in 2019 against one of the least popular governors in America in Matt Bevin.

But this past year, Beshear beat former Republican Attorney General Daniel Cameron by five percentage points, an impressive margin in a state that handed former president and current GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump a 26-point win in 2020.

Republican Secretary of State Michael Adams, a keen observer of electoral results in the state, is no Beshear fan. Still, he spoke with admiration of the governor’s ability to build a bipartisan brand that can pick off voters from the other side.

“This is a guy who won the votes of one out of eight Republican voters last year,” Adams said. “I’m sure that got the attention of national Democrats, as you don’t see a lot of ticket-splitting nationally. Right now, people are so polarized they’re just going to vote how they’re going to vote, and here’s a guy that’s managed to pick off Republican voters in a conservative state.”

The message and the messenger

The son of a former Democratic governor, Beshear came into statewide politics from a private law practice in 2015. In 2019, many observers said Bevin fared better than him in debates.

But something changed in the next four years.

During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the governor forced himself in front of cameras broadcasting all across the state almost every day. Delivering speeches and comforting constituents to a wide audience became an almost-daily ritual with his now-weekly “Team Kentucky” updates. That helped, according to Adams.

“He’s been an effective communicator, and he’s certainly gotten lots of experience with the Team Kentucky updates,” Adams said.

Throughout his 2023 re-election campaign, Beshear made no major gaffes.

There have been some crises and controversies — the state’s juvenile justice system is now subject to a federal inquiry, his record on open government has been questioned, a major donor has landed in hot water and the state unemployment insurance system was a boondoggle during the pandemic — but his message has not gotten muddled by leaks from the administration or those below him.

That’s a key strength identified by many who work with his closest allies in Frankfort.

“You watch all these other races unfold, and you see all these stories of backbiting, sniping and leaks. No one’s written that story about Beshear World because it’s a very cohesive group of folks and everybody does their jobs well. That extends to the official side,” Eric Hyers, Beshear’s top political consultant, told the Herald-Leader earlier this year.

Political brand

There are reasons to believe that Beshear’s political brand and identity could pair well with Harris’ should she become the nominee.

For one, cautious politicos may push for a white man to join the ticket alongside a minority woman.

“If you’re looking to balance a ticket that’s headed by the first Black and South Asian woman presidential nominee, then having a young white guy provides pretty good balance,” Al Cross, longtime Kentucky political journalist and observer, said. “A key to Biden’s election was how much better he did with white men than (Hillary) Clinton did, and that part of the electorate is still a weakness for Democrats.”

“We live in an era of identity politics, and his identity is a white guy.”

While it’s no guarantee that the hypothetical race for vice president is limited to white men, there are others to watch who might accept second fiddle in the White House. That very preliminary list includes Democratic governors Roy Cooper of North Carolina, Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania or J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, among others.

Beyond ethnicity and gender, Beshear’s uniquely “wholesome” branding might prove helpful.

Best known in-state for his response to a triad of crises — COVID-19, historic tornadoes in 2021 in the West and horrific flooding in 2022 in the East — Beshear was dubbed by the Associated Press as Kentucky’s “Consoler in Chief.”

At every turn in his gubernatorial tenure, Beshear has worked to present himself as an empathetic family man.

To a large extent, it’s worked.

Whether its anecdotal evidence like the Facebook meme page comparing him to feel-good television characters like Mister Rogers and Kermit the Frog that took off during the pandemic or polling data showing the durability of his favorability despite a barrage of negative ads last year, Kentuckians seem to like their governor.

“He’s certainly marketable,” Sen. Robin Webb, D-Grayson, said. “I mean, he’s handsome, he’s articulate and all those things… and I think reality’s set in that they’re not going to win with anyone other than a Democrat with the ability to work across the aisle, to not be polarizing, to be a uniter.”

It’s possible that translates to the national level in a race where the Democrats are running against a leading but still unpopular former president recently convicted of felony charges.

“They may decide that Kamala Harris is going to have to be a prosecutor and prosecute the Democrat’s case against Trump, metaphorically speaking, and Beshear is sort of like a spoonful of sugar, right?” Adams said. “A nice guy, good looking, beautiful family, stylistically moderate, kind of reassuring.

“That’s kind of an outside the box sort of choice, but certainly not outside the realm of possibility.”

His policy record… or lack thereof

A POLITICO story ran this week on the most popular governors in the country, a list that includes Beshear.

What binds many of them together? An inability to get much done when it comes to policy.

It may seem counterintuitive, but these governors’ position allows them to be choosy about the issues they champion, particularly when it comes to interfacing with supermajority state legislatures such as the GOP-led Senate and House in Kentucky.

“By picking and choosing their battles, they position themselves to voters as moderate, rational checks in the political center of statehouses otherwise veering to the extreme of either party,” the outlet explained. “That posturing often frustrates the lawmakers on the other side, who see these governors as unwilling to engage in the legislative trenches, allowing them to remain largely immune from policy risks.”

Abortion rights and direct teacher raises are prime examples for Beshear. The governor ran hard on those two issues, railing against the state’s near-total ban on abortion without exceptions for rape or incest and an 11% across-the-board raise for public school employees.

Neither of those proposals were seriously considered by the legislature in the immediate aftermath of Beshear’s win.

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Abortion rights is seen by many as a key issue for Democrats nationwide after the Supreme Court of the United States’ ruling in Dobbs overturning years of precedent that protected access to the procedure.

It’s one that Harris has keyed in on, even appearing on national television with Hadley Duvall, who rose to political fame by appearing in the most memorable of the 2023 Beshear campaign’s television advertisements.

That’s not the first time Beshear and Harris have crossed political paths in public, as the governor attended a White House event with the vice president on medical marijuana earlier this year.

Cross said that while the lack of change in Kentucky may be seen as a policy failure, the low expectations for a Democrat facing four-fifths Republican majorities allow for onlookers to give the governor a pass.

“In the textbooks, you might say that’s not necessarily a good thing,” Cross said. “In practical politics, it probably is. While he’s had failures in terms of getting anything passed, I don’t think anybody really expected him to get those things done. He’s avoided high-profile, possibly destructive battles with the legislature.

“Now he gets to go out and sing ‘Kumbaya’ as the legislators are probably shaking their heads.”